We live in an age of shock cinema, yet the decades-old films of Ingmar Bergman retain their ability to shake us.

Often thought of as an intellectual filmmaker, Bergman made films that were in fact more primal than rarefied, dealing with the most elemental aspects of life -- grief, loneliness, the fury and terror of the dying, the lust and mental anguish of the living.

This elemental aspect of Bergman is worth remembering as we approach his work, which is gradually trickling onto DVD. His films may be imposing and occasionally difficult, and he's unquestionably a thinking person's director, but I suspect that a prehistoric man could watch a Bergman movie and more or less get the point. In his relentless investigation into the terrors of life, Bergman meets us on the streets where we live.

Now in his mid-80s and retired from filmmaking -- though not from writing --

Bergman's critical luster remains undimmed. In the years since his three- decade heyday (in the '50s, '60s and '70s) -- in which every new Bergman film was received as a major cultural event -- critical thinking has coalesced around the obvious truth that this is one of the towering figures of cinema history.

Only DVD comes close to capturing the pristine clarity and crisp compositions of Bergman's films, and the latest DVD release is gorgeous to behold. It's a four-DVD boxed set from Criterion, featuring a trilogy of films dealing with the issue of faith: "Through a Glass Darkly" (1961), "Winter Light" (1962) and "The Silence" (1963). Also included is a fourth film, a 146- minute documentary called "Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie," about the making of "Winter Light." Directed by Vilgot Sjoman -- who'd soon gain fame for making the worst film ever made, "I Am Curious (Yellow)" -- the documentary originally aired on Swedish television in 1963.

"Through a Glass Darkly," which won the 1962 Academy Award for best foreign language film, traces the descent of a spirited young woman (Harriet Andersson) into the hell of mental illness. Her discovery that her novelist father (Gunnar Bjornstrand) plans to use her emotional collapse as fodder for his literary creations accelerates her slide, and soon she's tormented by visions and voices of her own imagining. Those solo moments, in which Andersson retreats into a room to commune with the spirits in her head, are extraordinary. Bergman inspires a level of commitment and trust from his actors that's unsurpassed.

"Winter Light," which Bergman considered the most realized of his films to this point, is an austere piece about a Lutheran priest (Bjornstrand), who tries, without success, to dissuade a depressed man (Max von Sydow) from suicide. The film has a Cold War aspect -- it's very much about the attempt to maintain faith in an age of nuclear threat, in which the prospect of annihilation renders every action seemingly pointless. The most emotionally chilly of the trilogy, it contains some striking moments of harshness, as when depicting the pastor's relationship with a devoted assistant (Ingrid Thulin).

The last film in the trilogy, "The Silence," created a stir in 1963 for its use of nudity and its presentation of raw carnality. Two sisters, Anna (Gunnel Lindbloom) and Ester (Thulin), find themselves stuck in an unnamed country on the verge of war, when Ester gets sick. As Anna's son wanders the hotel, Anna diverts herself through sensuality -- watching others have sex, picking up men.

Ester, less earthy, works on a translation and hopes to recover her strength.

In films by other directors, an audience might spend an entire movie digesting a plot in order to arrive at some special moment of revelation or emotional intensity. But such an achievement would be too small for Bergman. What he does instead in "The Silence" -- and in "Cries and Whispers" -- is attempt to make a movie composed entirely of such moments of revelation. Everything is intense. Every moment has meaning.

He doesn't succeed completely, and sometimes the movie's age shows. The boy's wandering about the hotel becomes occasionally tiresome, and when he makes friends with a troupe of traveling dwarfs, the scene has the feyness of bad Fellini. But no one who sees the movie will forget the scene in which Anna turns her rage on Ester, or the scenes of Ester, in the last stages of tuberculosis, struggling to breathe.

Criterion has released other Bergman titles in recent years, and they're all worth seeking out. The digital transfers are meticulous. From the '50s, there's "The Seventh Seal" (1957), in which a medieval knight plays chess with Death, and "Wild Strawberries," a highly accessible work about an old professor (Victor Sjostrom), who comes to terms with his own nature and mortality while traveling to receive an award from a university.

The '70s are represented by three titles. In "Cries and Whispers" (1972), one of the most intense films ever made, a woman (Andersson) dies a ghastly, agonizing death, and her sisters adjust emotionally around the event. "The Magic Flute" (1975) is a sparkling rendering of the Mozart opera, ranking among the best examples of opera on film. And "Autumn Sonata" (1978) stars Ingrid Bergman as a hard-driving, glamorous concert pianist, an example of success that her retiring, introverted and less talented daughter (Liv Ullmann) can't hope to live up to.

To encounter Bergman is to encounter a vision of life as a series of mysterious circumstances. It's to witness an attempt to cut through the clutter of hope, worry and ego and perceive life as it is. The work itself followed a similar journey toward simplicity of expression, moving away from symbols and allegory and toward an unvarnished, unencumbered directness of expression. The release of the trilogy, showing Bergman at mid-career, about to come into his mature glory, is a valuable addition to the catalog.